A company whose 3-D topographical mapping technology is already being used to combat wildfires in California and assess insurance risk in flood and hurricane zones is opening a new Auburn Hills office to introduce next-generation navigation systems to the domestic automotive industry.

Steve Zaroukian

Intermap Technologies Inc. is a Denver-based company that was founded in 1996. The company produces digital elevation models, orthorectified radar images and other products from its proprietary Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (IFSAR) technology.

The company's planes fly at 35,000 feet and send an X-band radar signal of 8 to 12 GHz toward the ground to measure changes in topography and elevation that are accurate within 1 meter no matter the weather conditions.

Intermap, which maintains another automotive office in Munich, Germany, is now modeling Western Europe and is focusing on the United States, where it has already flown and mapped areas including Southeast Michigan.

"We're using that for some of our development work with automotive partners," said Steve Zaroukian, director of the company's new Auburn Hills automotive division.

"What we're doing is we have some active development projects on the R&D side where we're doing proof-of-concept with key tier ones and (automakers) for various applications."

Two of those applications are outlined in a pair of university studies that focus on fuel economy.

Intermap in 2007 gave Auburn University a grant to look into how its technology could be used to design predictive cruise-controller and automatic gear-shifting algorithms could help improve fuel economy for commercial trucks by 3 percent to 5 percent. By providing information about road grades ahead, the company's algorithms could be used to calculate optimal vehicle speeds and gear selection, Zaroukian said.

The company is also working with Clemson University to address inefficiencies of battery charges in hybrid vehicles. The idea is to use Intermap's imaging technology to actively manage when a hybrid should use the internal combustion engine versus the battery by providing it with information about the road ahead.

"We're trying to commission Clemson University to quantify that data for us," Zaroukian said.